fwiw telecoms (or i guess its direct predecessor in many cases?) is so ubiquitous that it’s virtually an appliance. It’s unlikely that you even know anyone who doesn’t use telecommunications at least five times a day. probably a hot take but: AI sucks, but so did the steam engine three years after it’s debut. It was a gimmick that broke all the time and, even when it was working in full, could barely be finagled into doing a very small array of specific tasks. And then it got better. Check back on AI in ten years.
The reason for this bubble-looking graph is that all of the capitalization of low-hanging fruit gets completed and then the company has to start operating with slimmer margins. Cisco has almost a hundred thousand employees and 57 billion dollars of revenue, they just aren’t growing quite as fast any more.
reposting my hot AI take
Just because capital can’t possibly imagine more than 5 minutes in the future, and just because capital can only speak profit and couldn’t fathom progress for the sake of progress, doesn’t mean that AI isn’t real and scary. The technological hurdles are similar things that have been overcome in past technologies, the incentive to replace workers with machines is just as enticing as it’s ever been, and if we’ve seen noise and fervor like this now with this little of the total reward reaped, expect to continue to see this much noise and fervor until the last drop of blood has been squeezed out.